


the excitement of a gun is clicking off the safety

by GStK



Category: Granblue Fantasy (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:14:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24690637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GStK/pseuds/GStK
Summary: a kiss is a weapon. don't pull; squeeze.
Relationships: Belial/Lucifer/Sandalphon/Lucilius (Granblue Fantasy), Lucifer/Lucio (Granblue Fantasy)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	the excitement of a gun is clicking off the safety

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PlumTea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlumTea/gifts).



You can’t just pluck the suffering out of a man. The rose doesn’t wear its thorns to keep you from dragging it out of its bush. It’s the opposite, you see. The thorns wear the rose. The suffering wears the pride and the beauty to distract from the pain beneath.

Lucifer’s thinking of roses when he kisses Lucilius for the first time. He’s not sure why. Lucilius does not taste like rose petals. He doesn’t carry their aroma. He tastes like what he imagines the dark rings under his eyes must be like: heavy and bitter. He’s not angelic trumpets or the dawn of man on Lucifer’s tongue. He didn’t imagine that he would be… but the thought is there, anyway.

So Lucifer kisses Lucilius for the first time.

Lucilius is stiff beneath his hands. His friend is small: he has no muscle, he has no grace. The pause in his thoughts is the complete arresting of a machine. He’s gone so still he doesn’t even breathe. Like the flowers, he needs time to process what’s just been done to him. Later, he will bloom the consequences outward, in his eyes or on his face. It will take the shape of soft desire turned away from the sunlight. Would you call it fragile? No. _Interesting_.

Lucifer looks over Lucilius’ head. They’re beneath one of Canaan’s gazebos, surrounded by rose bushes. The origins for his thoughts are always nearby.

“What are you doing,” Lucilius asks, his voice all creaky doors and obfuscated intention.

What _is_ he doing? He’s following the calculations and theories of his mind to their natural conclusion. Lucilius has been shouldering the pack of ages. He’s grown thinner, though Astrals do not need to eat. His posture has hunched and his gaze has gone haunted. When he looks at Lucifer he sometimes appears to be perceiving a mirror turned on a supernova, which is a look Lucifer associates with Lucilius-upon-other-primals, never him.

“I worry for you, my friend,” says Lucifer.

Lucilius scoffs. “You were not built to worry.”

“I have seen your exhaustion and hoped to alleviate it.”

“Your ‘hope,’” returns Lucilius, making the word thin like a poor woman darning her sons’ socks for the seventh winter, “should be spent making observations and reports on the skydwellers’ evolution. Returning it to me in its raw form means nothing.”

This is their typical back-and-forth, but spun on its head. When they talk--lately, when they talk--it’s in circles around the truth. Lucilius is caught up in his new project. Lucifer is beginning to suspect something. Lucilius won’t tell him a thing, and Lucifer has noticed his reports are skimmed at best. Between them, someone is digging a grave. But angels, the skydwellers say, are spirits who have already died.

Out of the two of them, that leaves one. One victim. One murderer. Lucilius wants him to keep his vigil and let it happen that way. Lucifer doesn’t want to. So: he kisses Lucilius again.

The cogs seize up a second time. He finds a pitter-patter of delight in his chest. The gravekeeper must wait for them yet.

“Do you even understand what you’re doing?”

Lucifer, putting his arms around Lucilius--so slight, smaller than Sandalphon, needing to turn up his head to meet his gaze-- smiles.

“My friend,” he says patiently, tone like an antidote for a rose, “You should trust, for once, that someone besides yourself knows what he is doing.”

Lucilius swallows the poison back with a sound like a vicious sob.

Then, they are upon each other, robes and leather armour tangling under the gazebo’s shade.

* * *

Belial is trickier. His brother-in-arms was pulled out from under him a while ago. Now, he answers to Lucilius directly. Often, he’s the representative that goes in Lucilius’ stead to speak to the Council. They’ve been bearing their full weight down on Canaan, asking for answers to questions that don’t make sense.

\-- Belial. Lucifer shakes his head to uncloud his thoughts. This is how Belial works. He makes his actions so loud that they seem like his personality. He swims the social waters well and pretends that swimming is slithering. He likes to think he is a snake. As a snake does, he wraps around Lucilius as his anchour point.

He’s got his knuckles pressed against his lips, teeth bared in a ferocious grin. He’s like a black hole. Or, he pretends he’s like a black hole. He distracts you from the real message by making everything else about himself impossibly loud. Thankfully, Lucifer does not need total stillness to hear. Not any more.

Belial with his grin says, “Cifer! Buddy, pal. What do you think you’re doing?”

The question from Lucilius was simple. The same question from Belial is turned at a Dutch angle. What do you _think_ you’re doing. What do you _think_?

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Lucifer replies, palming the hilt on one of his swords. Belial barks a laugh.

“You know perfectly well. Don’t act like a fool.”

That’s Lucilius’ favourite word. So, this is about Lucilius.

Lucifer, turning to face Belial. “If you refer to yesterday, then I was simply trying to alleviate my friend of his stress.” Belial’s expression doesn’t change, so he adds, “I was sending him a message.”

This has Belial in fits. He doesn’t bowl over and clutch his stomach laughing, but he chuckles, which is about the same thing. “‘Sending him a message,’ he says! You’re so full of yourself, you know that?”

“I’ve never had anyone else in me,” Lucifer says. Inviting.

Belial does not take the bait. He straightens his back, and his lips close over his teeth in a thin smile. “You really think you can stop this rock from rolling? You really think one kiss is going to turn Cil’s mind into sunshine and daisies?”

Lucifer, shaking his head. “Of course not.” A pause. “I know only what I can do.” Another pause. Sole on marble. A step forward. “I will bring this all to an end. I am choosing the way in which I wish to end it.”

Jealous possessive snake Belial scoffs. Lucilius-is-my-skin-my-one-my-only Belial drops his hands to his sides. “You touch him again, and you won’t like the ending you get, Cifer.”

A stand. Threatening posture. Lucifer recognises the signals being sent. _Don’t touch him_. A smaller voice adds, _I don’t want him to look at you_. Belial is letting out all these words in Morse code, a distress signal in red eyes and everything never said.

Lucifer seizes him by the chin. “That is no way for an adjutant to talk to his commander.”

Belial smirks. “I’m not yours any more, remember?”

When they kiss, it’s with Belial slack against him, unresponsive. He’s not trying to figure it out; he just doesn’t want to play the game. But by the fourth or the fifth, something rears up in him, and then he is teeth and anger and neediness drenching Lucifer’s red stola in fingers.

“I am the supreme,” Lucifer reminds him. “Everything belongs to me.”

Belial pants, his upper lip grazing Lucifer’s lower lip. He says nothing.

Softer, Lucifer amends, “You are my equal and I will not give you up to this.”

Belial cracks like a cavern yawning open from the force of an earthquake. Old life and secrets spreading its legs open to be rediscovered.

He kisses Lucifer of his own volition.

* * *

Sandalphon has made the garden a battleground. Their usual table is upturned like a barricade. When Lucifer steps into the sun, a coffee cup goes barrelling past his shoulder, crashing against the side of the laboratory.

“Stay away from me!”

Lucifer steps delicately around a bunch of plants ripped out of the ground and approaches.

A saucer tries to meet his face. He cants his head to the side and it, too, shatters upon the laboratory. Rumours don’t spread in the garden, not like they do in the halls. Sandalphon should have no idea what he’s done.

Logic leads him to the easy fact. Belial has been here, trying to bring Sandalphon into their fold. Perhaps it was sabotage. More likely, it was simple excitement. Lucifer sighs. (Belial can be a handful. Primarch of cunning, to be sure, but not the primarch of tact.)

“Sandalphon.”

“I said **stay away**.”

“Why are you angry?”

“You already know!” Sandalphon roars. This time, one of Lucifer’s nursing coffee trees comes sailing at him. He dips around it like a dancer circling his partner. It spills from its burlap sack and gets soil everywhere. He had been looking forward to planting it.

“Tell me, Sandalphon.”

“You,” Sandalphon says, voice cresting higher as he echoes, “You-- you. Youuuu.” His inflection is broken by tears. He’s resigned himself to a fate worse than death: life as a character in a romantic stage play. His continual spill of “You, you, you --” is both heartwarming and sad.

He breaches the front line and strolls into Sandalphon’s territory. Sandalphon has backed himself into a corner of the nursery as his last stand. He’s clutching Lucifer’s garden spade like a weapon.

“Sandalphon…”

“I thought you loved me!”

He’s spitting out the lines Belial probably helped him rehearse yesterday. Lucifer stops at an acceptable distance, hands open in a show of peace. He shuts his eyes. “Tell me everything.” Let Sandalphon act out the rest of his character. He would be indignant if not allowed to finish the performance.

“You know who came here?” Sandalphon growls. “ _Belial_. That-- he. Him. I heard it from him! He told me you were-- you were kissing… do you even know what kissing means, Lord Lucifer!?”

Lucifer opens his eyes. Sandalphon looks stung. He probably hadn’t intended for the honorific to come out. Lucifer does him a kindness and does not so much as cough at the slip in character. “What do you think it means, Sandalphon?”

“An eternal promise,” his sparrow replies speedily. Lucifer provided the correct line. “You kiss the one you intend to be with, always. You kissed Belial. **Belial**!”

“As well as Lucilius.”

“ _As well as_ \--”

Before Sandalphon can finish his appalled repetition, Lucifer comes forward. Sandalphon draws the spade between them. He looks unsure as to whether he should turn it on Lucifer or himself. In the plays, the spurned lover usually ends her life by weapon to the chest. Their cores are located at the center of their abdomens, where the humours might be if they were skydweller. It ruins Sandalphon’s flair.

“You are not wrong. A kiss is a promise and a union between lovers.” Lucifer tucks his chin towards his chest in slow affirmation. “I kissed Belial. I kissed Lucilius. I wish to be lovers with them. They have already kissed one another, and I surmise…” _Surmise_ is a Lucilius word. Lucifer reaches for himself and amends what he was saying. “I expect you’ve been kissed by Belial as well?”

Sandalphon makes a strangled sound. When the stillness settles like ice between them, he cuts himself on the shards and nods, almost imperceptibly.

“I had wished to take you as my lover first. He’s always been greedy. Yet, the end result is the same. I would like to be with you forever, Sandalphon.” He chances a soft smile. “Would you do me the honour of being mine?”

The little sparrow is regarding him with wide eyes. A lover is a purpose, isn’t it? To be a lover is to have a purpose. Belial has already taken Sandalphon for his own, which leaves two.

“I’ve always loved you. From the very start,” confesses Sandalphon in a stringy voice. Lucifer takes his cue and arrives center stage, enveloping Sandalphon in his arms. With Sandalphon’s heels, they’re not far apart in height.

Lucifer lifts himself on his wings for dramatic effect. Sandalphon must come on his tiptoes to receive Lucifer’s kiss, a long, enduring moment that is no more than a peck of lips.

They come apart but not undone. Lucifer takes the spade and sets it on a nearby shelf. Sandalphon buries himself in Lucifer’s arms, exactly where he should be.

“This is my purpose…”

“Ah.” Sandalphon glances up, immediately unsure. Wide eyes. Fragile eyes. He’s more bluebird than sparrow in this moment. “You have one more task to fulfill.”

“What’s that?”

* * *

It is the equivalent of dragging two toddlers, kicking and screaming, into the same room to make up. Sandalphon immediately unfurls his wings and tries to fly away. Lucifer catches him by the ankle, and Sandalphon flaps in vain. Lucilius, for his part, is a struggling mass of robes caught in the iron bars of Belial’s arms.

_Get off of me! This is foolish! Calm down, calm down. This is for your own good. You’ll like it! I swear on every tome ever written by my own hand that I will render you down into your component molecules--_

And such and such.

Lucilius is the one to break fast and grab Sandalphon by the neck. He presses down on the back of Sandalphon’s shoulders with his thumb, asserting his fleeting dominance. They kiss once, and only once. It is a cute sight.

Both of them flee to opposite corners when they are released. Sandalphon darts into Lucifer’s arms. Lucilius must be persuaded to be held again by Belial, but he sinks into the weight of his first lover, and then they kiss angrily. It’s like Lucilius is trying to scrub the taste of Sandalphon off his tongue.

“I’m his lover?” Sandalphon asks, both disgusted and dumbstruck.

Lucifer gives him a nod, pleased. “We all are. For now and forever.”

“... I’d prefer to be yours only,” Sandalphon says demurely. There’s acid there.

Lucifer kisses it away. The pact is sealed.

* * *

_On the wings of a dream_ \--

He has wings, and dreams do not.

Then. _On the breath of a sigh_ \--

Sighs are aggressive. Lucilius wields them like a weapon.

_Will you be content with nothing_?

Lucifer replies, mildly, “I am not one for poetry.”

The Speaker meets him in liminal pastel space. Lucifer blinks and they are in a stagehouse. It’s assembled from parts of his memories, piecemeal, so it looks like everything he recognises but not one specific venue. The Speaker laughs with his face and crosses the stage to greet him.

“Poetry is a wonderful way to pass the time. I must recommend it.”

Lucifer feels for his swords and finds them there. He must make his discomfort apparent from the gesture, rather than the threat it should have been. The Speaker sighs and resumes his usual appearance, like a god out of the stories. He has long, flowing hair like a maiden, and a robe that displays his… skin.

The Speaker breathes a soft laugh. “You do not like me, it seems.”

Lucifer keeps his face neutral. “I am not in love with you.” That face belongs to Lucilius. Not the Speaker. And before the Speaker can open his mouth and interrupt, he floods his thoughts with all he remembers. Clones -- purpose -- the Creator -- so on and so forth. He remembers what he was told in a long chain of dreams. He has no desire to hear it repeated.

“Do you think,” the Speaker inquires seriously, “that a kiss will stop his project? That the end will simply… cease to arrive?”

Lucifer tastes his lips. Thorns, serpents, sparrows. He can feel their tug. “Belial will protect me from the unseen threats. Sandalphon speaks of wishing to practice the blade. Lucilius…”

“I wish he were not so,” sighs the Speaker.

“Not so…?”

“I would say ‘corrupted.’ However, I suspect you might turn your blade on me if I did.”

Lucifer doesn’t answer, but tightens his hand on his sword to confirm the truth.

The Speaker smiles in a tired and tight way. “Pacts are so easily broken.”

“I am the supreme primarch.”

“Yet you bear no honour or strength in saying so. You simply say it, because it is what he calls you,” the Speaker replies, sounding sad.

Lucifer studies him for a long time. He lets go of his blade, and he steps forward. The Speaker allows Lucifer to fill his space. Lucifer murmurs, “Lucilius wishes for answers. I can give them. And if I do not have them, I can shape them. For him. For the three of them.”

“You are fighting a losing battle, ‘my friend,’” the Speaker answers.

“You have taken the measure of the four of us,” Lucifer nods. The stillness shared between them is mutual. The Speaker bares his neck, and Lucifer speaks against his pulse. “I know, as we are, we are inadequate. For this reason, I have come here.”

“To meet me?”

“To meet you.”

The Speaker pauses, and then he gives a delighted laugh. The stage curtains dance on the wind of his breath. “Oh, what a surprise!”

He turns his face to Lucifer, and he smiles into the arriving kiss.

They do not hold each other. They stand in one another’s boundaries. The Speaker is an ally made. Yet, they are not lovers.

“You do not love me,” the Speaker observes.

Lucifer nods, then frowns in thought. “If you come to my dreams--more than to give me visions--I believe that will change.”

“What a surprise!”

His hands find the waist of the Speaker. He has a broad chest, but it curves down into a thin reed. The Speaker laughs, once again, nervously. He has never been held by anyone but his Creator, Lucifer supposes.

“I will make my own conclusion.”

The Speaker nods against his cheek, shutting his eyes. “I hope for all of us it is satisfactory.”

He is the morning star. He is the redshift across the sundrop light. He is the overseer of evolution. He is greater than the six wings he inhabits.

“I will make my own conclusion,” Lucifer says again, and kisses the Speaker into a shuddery, accepting mess.

The taste Lucifer licks across his lips, when he wakes up, is the pomegranate.

**Author's Note:**

> "I’m telling you ot4 would have solved wmtsb" - Plumtea, 05/30/2020


End file.
